Paving the way for Vulcans, Slan, Espers, Professor X and Babylon 5’s Lyta Alexander, SF writers of that genre’s Radium Age (1900-35) dared to imagine how we might react if telepaths were discovered among us.

In the late 19th century, scholars and scientists in Europe and America turned their collective attention not only to the mind, but to the paranormal. In 1882, the term “telepathy” was coined by a founder of the Society for Psychical Research; a boom in occult, proto-SF, and SF romances featuring various kinds of extra-sensory perceptions followed. Since 1892, as near as I can make out, at least one telepathy-related SF novel has been published every single year. (With one exception: 1910.) As with the SF superman, the telepath is an uncanny figure: alluring, impressive, inspiring, but also terrifying. We love and hate them. We want them out of our heads!

[A version of this item first appeared on Gawker’s sci-fi blog io9.com, on April 15, 2009.]

Here’s a rundown — in no particular order — of 10 of my favorite telepaths from Radium Age SF.

1) ZEE, in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871). The unnamed narrator finds his way into a too-perfect subterranean civilization peopled by the Vril-ya. Zee, a scholarly young female, takes him under her wing (literally, at times). Having taken refuge from a Deluge millennia earlier, the Vril-ya have evolved into a master race who can focus their wills to use “Vril,” a Force-like source of energy, for anything and everything from healing to destroying, from shaping matter to powering machines, and from mesmerization to telepathy. (“Zee asked me if, in my world, it was not known that all the faculties of the mind could be quickened to a degree unknown in the waking state, by trance or vision, in which the thoughts of one brain could be transmitted to another, and knowledge be thus rapidly interchanged.”) Though he discovers that the Vril-ya, whose advances have rendered them amoral, are running out of habitable space and plan to (re)claim the surface of the planet, the narrator is released. Fun facts: Bulwer-Lytton’s popular novel influenced J.R.R. Tolkien’s rings of power, Nazi mystics, Hollow Earth theorists, Tesla’s research into remote control, and England’s “fluid beef” product Bovril (Bovine + Vril).READ IT | READ IT | BUY IT

2) STELLA, in George Allan England’s The Empire in the Air (serialized 1914). Paul Kramer, a daredevil flyer is abducted — or, rather, sublimated — into the fourth dimension while attempting to set a new altitude record over Boston. His fiancee, Stella, is highly mediumistic, so Kramer is able to warn her of an attack by beings from “beyond the universe.” In search of life energy, these globs of solidified light “at absolute zero” plan to disintegrate the Earth. How to stop them? Communicating via Stella, Kramer instructs fellow aviators to fly up to the altitude where he disappeared and join him in the fourth dimension. They do so, and — by focusing their collective will power — are able to fire the atmospheric dust left in the Earth’s atmosphere, via the eruption of Krakatoa. This destroys the invading aliens, and Earth is saved. Fun fact: England is the author of three other excellent early SF novels, The Air Trust, Darkness and Dawn, and The Flying Legion.BUY IT

The Devolutionist was first serialized in this issue of Argosy.

3) DR. KINNEY & CO., in Homer Eon Flint’s The Devolutionist (novella, serialized 1921). Flint was one the outstanding pre-Amazing Stories pulp SF writers. His “Dr. Kinney” series (The Lord Of Death, The Queen Of Life,The Devolutionist, and “The Emancipatrix“) explore theories about, for example, the survival of the fittest and benign dictatorships… on other planets. Having learned how to visit other worlds telepathically, without leaving Earth — i.e., by means of Venusian technology — Kinney and his companions enter the minds and share the sensations of the inhabitants of a human-like civilization on a double planet. One planet (Hafen) is the abode of capitalists; the other (Holl) of workers. Not content merely to study the goings-on, Kinney & co. help the workers’ revolutionary party stop the Hafenites from invading the nearby planet Alma, which is inhabited by “‘cooperative democrats'; that is, they do not compete with each other for a living, but work together in all things, in complete equality.” Then a Hafenite WMD separates the twin planets. Fun facts: Flint reportedly died as a result of an involvement in a bank robbery attempt. In 1965, Ace published The Devolutionist, and The Emancipatrix together, under a single title; best title ever?READ IT | READ IT | BUY IT

4) ?, in Muriel Jaeger’s The Man with Six Senses (1927). Muriel Jaeger’s Radium Age SF novels sound fascinating, and terrific. She was at Oxford with one of my favorite mystery writers, Dorothy L. Sayers, which makes me imagine that her style is equally erudite yet funny. Her first novel, The Question Mark (1926), has been described as a “Libertarian socialist utopia” and a “scientific romance.” I also like the sound of Jaeger’s SF novels Sisyphyus, or the Limits of Psychology (1929), Hermes Speaks (1933), and Retreat from Armageddon (1936). But they’re all deeply out of print, and expensive; so I’ve never read any of ‘em. Still, I’m including The Man with Six Senses on this Top Ten list because SF scholars call it one of the first attempts at thoughtfully, even painstakingly extrapolating what it might mean to have extra-sensory perceptions… leading to the conclusion that it might be more of a burden than a blessing. Alas, these scholars don’t mention the young male protagonist’s name, so I can’t provide it here. Fun fact: Jaeger’s SF novels were published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press.GET IT FROM A LIBRARY | MORE JAEGER BOOKS

5) ORO and YVA, in H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook: Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley, and Arbuthnot (serialized 1918-19). A fantasy novel of the discovery and awakening of two Atlanteans who have been in a state of suspended animation for 250,000 years. In one of the few SF tales by the author of King Solomon’s Mines and She, Humphrey Arbuthnot and companions discover the last two survivors of an Atlantis-like advanced civilization; they have been in a state of suspended animation for 250,000 years. Now awoken, the scientist Oro — who’d been the civilization’s priest-king — uses his paranormal mental abilities (clairvoyance, teleportation, mind control) to study WWI-era Europe and its colonies. Dismayed by the miserable and degenerate state of affairs he sees, Oro decides to destroy humankind. His daughter Yva (Eve) sacrifices herself to prevent him from doing so.READ IT | READ IT | BUY IT

6) DROWSY, in J.A. Mitchell’s Drowsy (1917). Cyrus Alton, a telepath nicknamed Drowsy because of his drooping eyelids, grows up to attend MIT and become a brilliant scientist. He invents a spaceship equipped with an antigravity mechanism, and flies to the moon, returning with a fantastic diamond… and then, impelled by a psychic bond with a childhood sweetheart, rescues her before she joins a convent. Of greater interest, though, is Mitchell’s account of Drowsy’s childhood. Is he the first of a new species: homo superior? Like the title character of Beresford’s Hampdenshire Wonder, the boy’s evolved worldview offends his narrow-minded elders. Especially when, for example, he cuts his favorite illustrations out of a Bible; or insists on the morality of untruths; or demands to know why “teacher doesn’t tell us things worth knowing.” Like Daniel Clowes’s Enid Coleslaw, that is to say, Drowsy is a cranky middle-aged freethinker in a child’s body. Fun facts: The author, a Harvard dropout and idler, founded the original LIFE Magazine, later purchased by Henry Luce, in 1883. Also: With Horace Greeley, Mitchell founded the Fresh Air Fund.

7) TIZOC, in Herbert Clock and Eric Boetzel’s Light in the Sky (1929). An unnamed narrator is kidnapped, and wakes up in an Aztlan, an underground civilization where the Aztecs — he discovers — have been living ever since they fled from Cortez in the time of Montezuma’s defeat. In the intervening centuries, they’ve invented airships, solar power, sleep rays, and rejuvenation/immortality, not to mention an atomic-energy-style weapon called the Eighth Color. Aztlan’s leader is Tizoc, Montezuma’s brother, a telepath who has mastered the electromagnetic spectrum. Discovering that he’s a descendant of Cortez whose ritual sacrifice will mark the re-emergence of the Aztecs into the surface world, which they plan to conquer, the narrator plans to escape. (Up to this point, the novel closely rips off The Coming Race.) Tizoc reads his mind and reveals something that even his own son doesn’t know: Instead of conquering the surface world, he plans to benefit it with Aztec science. Then Tizoc is killed by his son, and Aztlan is destroyed. Fun fact: Everett F. Bleiler says of this novel that “One has the impression that the authors sought to write the wildest possible story.”READ IT |

The Black Monarch was first serialized in this issue of Weird Tales

8) REZ, in Paul Ernst’s The Black Monarch (serialized Feb.-June 1930). Yet another Coming Race-style yarn. In 1992, Dr. Sanderson, foster-son of an inventor who’s created a machine that can respond to thought waves, detects the presence of an immensely evil being in Algeria. He and an adventurer, Neil Emory, discover a subterranean civilization beneath that country; it is ruled by Rez, an immortal ancient Egyptian whose brain is so enlarged that he’s replaced his own skull with a metal contraption. Rez has highly developed paranormal powers — he converses telepathically, and, with the aid of a huge diamond crystal, controls the wills of his small, robot-like subjects. From his underground lair he’s manipulating the world into a war that will smash civilization as we know it. Despite being overpowered and tortured by Rez, Sanderson and Emory must find a way to defeat him. Fun facts: From 1939-42, under the name Kenneth Robeson, Ernst would write the original 24 Avenger stories for the magazine of that title. Pulp expert Don Hutchison has called Ernst “a prolific manufacturer of potboilers-made-to-order.”

9) HARRY MAXWELL, in Lilith Lorraine’s The Brain of the Planet (1929). In 1935 Harry Maxwell, a radical and brilliant young scientist, becomes convinced that telepathy is merely a technical question, a matter of positive (sending) and negative (receiving) minds. He and some friends build a wireless transmission station in Mexico… but instead of broadcasting radio waves, they broadcast thought waves that derive their energy from the collective unconscious. Their message? Altruism. Left- and right-wing fanatics everywhere drop dead upon impact; everyone else responds positively. Before you know it, a united world state governs a populace in which everyone is socially, economically, and sexually fulfilled. Fun fact: Lorraine, whose real name was Mary M. Wright, was a poet, Texas crime reporter, and early feminist utopian; she ended up with an FBI file because of her socialist views. She chose the pen name Lilith in honor of a fellow “troublemaker,” i.e., the Biblical Adam’s first wife.

10) THE SNAKE MOTHER, in A. Merritt’s The Face in the Abyss (1931). This semi-occult SF novel, which combines “The Face in the Abyss” (serialized Sept. 1923) and its sequel, “The Snake Mother” (serialized Oct.-Dec. 1930), is set in the Peruvian Andes. Treasure-hunter Nicholas Graydon rescues Suarra, handmaiden to Adana, the Snake Mother of Yu-Atlanchi, from his own companions. Adana is the last of a race of superintelligent serpent people whose servants, the Old Race, are immortal. Although possessed of fragments of their former superior science, they are now obsessed with sex, hunting mutants with dinosaurs, and dream machines. Adana, who possesses spectacular paranormal abilities, is humankind’s only defense against Nimir, a Sauron- or Voldemort-like mage who’d conquer the world if he could inhabit a physical body. He wants Graydon’s, but a band of Old Race outlaws and mutated spiders thwart him. Fun facts: Merritt was once considered the greatest SF writer of modern times; he had a magazine – A. Merritt’s Fantasy Magazine – named after him. E.F. Bleiler praises his “sweeping ideas, high emotion, and perpetual suggestions of deeper phenomena beneath the surface of events.”BUY IT | READ IT

HiLoBooks has rediscovered 10 lost classics from science fiction's Radium Age (1904–33) era. A gorgeous paperback series — collect them all while you can!

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